The independence movement must embody the principles of the nation we want to live in

In reply to KK

Great post KK. I too have grave reservations about modern feminism and how Plaid are happy to have women wearing niqabs representing them. Leanne Wood and Bethan Jenkins want to smash the imagined western patriarchy but fully embrace actual patriarchy by getting into bed with an intolerant, pre-medieval ideology. As a gay person I feel Plaid and other leftist parties need to make a choice: LGBT or Islam. As the Birmingham parents incidents prove, you can't have both.

In reply to KK

Wylfa? Dont give me that scam (most new skilled imported workers wont ever learn you local welsh dialects, in this system - face facts) ...... its going to take over 100 billion to clean up ... think lad.....decommissioning the expensive phase Nuclear is not sustainable ....... community own renewables like tidal and offshore wind are....or even small scale hydroelectric and solar farms are getting cheaper

In reply to KK

I couldn't agree more, but perhaps you should be questioning whether or not those you are critical of are in fact feminists in the true sense? Feminism isn't about the liberation just of women, but all of us, and should be promoted more as about the abolition of patriarchy. Unfortunately feminism, as a human institution, is as susceptible to the creation of hierarchies and cliques as any other, and so the movement will always be at rick of being hijacked by those whose interests are raw power, using feminism as a shield - think about what happened in revolutionary Russia after 1917 when the Bolsheviks hijacked it and used communism as a front to take total control and impose their dictatorship. Read Germaine Greer, or Lynne Segal and you will receive a far fairer picture about what feminism is about. Joanne, I understand where you are coming from, and sympathise, but please don't fall for the corrosive rhetoric surrounding Islam. It doesn't need to be a case of either/or LGBTQ+ or Islam, our small country can contain both - but I think you do have a point about the niqab. It's clearly a case where a cultural phenomenon has become conflated with a religious requirement when in fact no such requirement exists, otherwise all Muslim women would be so veiled. Fair enough if a woman, at an individual level has chosen to dress in this way, for whatever reason, in their own time. Whilst I personally don't like seeing veiled women, I have to accept that it may be their free choice, and I'm certainly totally against anyone being subject to harassment or assault simply because of what they are wearing. However, I would very much be in favour of bringing in strict rules that demanded that those who work for state bodies or attend institutions that are state supported have to commit to respecting secularism - which means a total ban on religious symbols or dress. However, I don't think it is the Muslim population who are any kind of real threat to yr iaith Gymraeg , as that comes from a different quarter, and one we are far to much at pains to appease and not seem unwelcoming I also feel strongly over the issue of the Welsh language, particularly in area such as Ceredigion. When and where I started school in rural Ceredigion in 1962 about 95% of the children came from Welsh speaking homes, and in the reception class most only spoke Welsh. There was only one other child in my class that spoke English, and I was at the time bilingual, but it was French and English, which wasn't a lot of use. needless to say, I soon learned the basics, as children do, through play and simply in order to communicate at all. We Welsh are notoriously self-effacing until it gets to the point where we explode with rage because no one seems to be respecting the genus loci - but we are dealing predominantly with people who have an arrogant mentality, who, at a fundamental, and possibly only at a semi-conscious level, don't see the need to respect a people, who deep down, they regard as sub-human. Now, I'm sure that most of those people would be horrified to think that they could be be seen in that light at all, but it does go a long way to explain their disrespect of us as a people, which it fundamentally is. Unfortunately, too many of us encourage that approach by not demanding that those moving here learn our language and integrate into our society. Much of the responsibility for the current state of affairs is ours alone, and we need to shake off the centuries old servility and start to respect ourselves. Of course, we all know there are exceptions to the picture I'm painting, those who move here, and intuitively realise that they are in a different place, with a different language, and go about enthusiastically acquiring it as soon as they can. They categorically aren't the problem, but rather part of the solution. I don't think surliness is an answer, any more than I think that cheerfully continually accommodating the prat who moved to the area 25 years ago and still wilfully mispronounces local place names is. Our apparent cheerful accommodation often has a very corrosive flip side where many of us feel a seething resentment, not so much against the individuals, but perhaps at ourselves for tolerating the situation. I think many ordinary Welsh speakers cast this to the very back of their minds, to the extent they don't think about it at all, and appear supine, which of course is the way that far too many eco-warrior types prefer us - hypocritically all concerned about the destruction of the habitat that supports indigenous Amazonian peoples whilst they destroy ours through Anglicisation. We're never going to influence the really arrogant lebensraumers, (I know, not a very nice label, but what those white settlers are doing isn't very nice either). All rather hypocritically supporting the Palestinians, whilst castigating the Welsh who want to protect their way of life. The best thing we can do there is just be obstinate, and mostly refuse to speak English to them. To the more receptive, most of them probably do feel some tinge of guilt that they aren't speaking Welsh to them, so we really do need to speak Welsh to them, even if it is a bit of a pain, and speaking English to them would be infinitely easier! Be friendly, but speak Welsh, all the time. Very soon, they'll be fluent, more or less painlessly, and they won't sound like they're reading a book, or the news, but the local lingo - which in the case of Ceredigion will be more or less unintellgible to me, (and I'm from Ceredigion originally) and sound awful, but then I learned the dulcet tones of Ardudwy, which no doubt sounds awful to many others. I don't know if anyone read the recent article in the Guardian entitled "Let's all move to... Ceredigion" but the comments section was full of the predictable, commenters who had lived in Ceredigion proudly stating that they hadn't bothered to learn Welsh in all that time, or those who claimed that they were not 'good at languages' (FFS, all humans have the ability to learn languages, and most seem to be blissfully unaware that they've already learned one language to fluency, so they retain the skills to learn another - sure it's a large task, it took them quite a few years to learn their first language, and the process of learning a second or subsequent language is going to take them some time too) when all they actually mean is that they just can't be bothered to learn the language of people they basically regard as ignorant peasants, who anyway speak English.